Enhancing engagement on the news articles within the intranet platfrom.
Challenge
Increase user engagement.
During the ongoing work for a new version of the intranet (2.0), through analysing data with the data analyst, several areas were identified which needed significant improvement to help increase ux and user engagement.
Research & Discovery
Through the research phase we analysed data (hotpoints, click throughs etc) as well as reaching out to user to understand what there main areas for concern and what apps/widgets they used most often. From this we identified that the news articles was mainly front and center of most of the intranet homepages and users felt the articles were generic which made them not want to engage, this became our focus area for the sprint.
Audit
Using all the data gathered, an audit was conducted of the current area, to which all points were highlights and noted to create areas of focus for the designs.
Approach
Engagement is key.
As engagement became a key area, we began market research to see how interactions behaved on blogs, social media, news website etc. We began with low-fi wireframes to get an understanding of what information we wanted and what would be valuable to the user.
Refinement
From the feedback, low-fi wireframes and the focus group sessions carried out, we narrowed down the requirements to adding likes and comments to encourage engagement, improve readability and accessibility and make information clear to users. We worked closely with engineering to focus on having more tailored news feeds for each individual user.
We found after a couple of high fidelity test that something extra came into play as to why user don't tend to click on and read the article. This was that the users are busy at work and don't think they have time to read the articles, we took this challenge and were able to implement a feature that would tell the user how long it takes to read, giving them more knowledge that it is usually just a quick few minute read. We also took this opportunity to add the area the article relates to.
Findings
Improved engagement and increase in ROI.
The 2.0 version of News Articles, became very successful. By improving the user experience and giving users more personalised feeds based on their likes and departments, engagement was increased dramatically. Whilst still in the prototyping phase of this feature, the company secured the highest ARR client to date, with feedback specifically stating that the personalisation and engagement features specifically on the news articles was key to securing the deal as this is what they felt they were missing within current internal communications system.
This encouraged the company to invest further into personal user experiences and explore the use of AI, to understand how it can be used to help and improve the product.
